Papers

Comments are most welcome! Published papers are present here in their penultimate versions - please consult the published version before quoting, citing, or telling your friends that the paper in question sucks. (Warning: Some papers marked "talk format" may be a bit puzzling in places without the accompanying slides, some of which I haven't provided. They may also contain feeble jokes. If you have ideas for better jokes, please email me: dan.ryder@ubc.ca.)

Intentionality and mental representation

Models in the Brain (book): The issues surrounding mental content that were intensely debated in the 1980's and 90's remained unresolved, and no new approaches have been forthcoming since. Now, intense interest in consciousness, perceptual content, concepts, and mental representation has once again brought the issue of intentionality to the fore. Models in the Brain aims to present a new naturalistic theory of intentionality that addresses these problems freshly with a much-needed injection of neuroscience, opening up the subject to empirical investigation in a new way.
The central idea is that the cerebral cortex is a model building machine, where regularities in the world serve as templates for the models it builds. First it is shown how this idea can be naturalized, and how the representational contents of our internal models depend upon the evolutionarily endowed design principles of our model building machine. Current neuroscience suggests a powerful form that these design principles may take, allowing our brains to uncover deep structures of the world hidden behind surface sensory stimulation, the individuals, kinds, and properties that form the objects of human perception and thought. It is then shown how this account solves various problems that arose for previous attempts at naturalizing intentionality, and also how it supports rather than undermines folk psychology. As in the parable of the blind men and the elephant, the seemingly unrelated pieces of earlier theories (information, causation, isomorphism, success, and teleology) emerge as different aspects of the evolved model-building mechanism that explains the intentional features of our kind of mind.
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Problems of representation I: nature and role(From Francisco Garzon and John Symons (eds.) The Routledge Companion to the Philosophy of Psychology, London: Routledge (2009): pp. 233-250.) A review of the concept of representation in philosophy of psychology and psychology itself, focusing on different ways of drawing the representational/non-representational contrast. There are a wide variety of proposals for what constitutes representationhood, relying on degree of structure, degree of systematicity, degree of similarity to representeds, characteristic uses or functions (like allowing reaction in the absence of a stimulus, or playing a role in detection, storage, information processing, problem solving, or classification). Many debates about the nature and role of various kinds of mental representations can be illuminated by attending to the participants' assumptions about what makes something a representation.Download pdf

On thinking of kinds: a neuroscientific perspectivein Teleosemantics (Graham Macdonald and David Papineau, eds.) Oxford University Press, 2006. Reductive, naturalistic psychosemantic theories do not have a good track
record when it comes to accommodating the representation of kinds. A teleosemantic theory could make room for such representation if kindhood itself could be causally relevant to the selection of a representational system. I argue that such is the case for the human mind, at least. Download pdf | Buy from Amazon

SINBAD Neurosemantics: A theory of mental representation(Mind & Language 19(2), 2004) I present an account of mental representation based upon the "SINBAD"
theory of the cerebral cortex. If the SINBAD theory is correct, then networks of
pyramidal cells in the cerebral cortex are appropriately described as representing, or
more specifically, as modelling the world. I propose that SINBAD representation reveals
the nature of the kind of mental representation found in human and animal minds, since
the cortex is heavily implicated in these kinds of minds. Finally, I show how SINBAD
neurosemantics can provide accounts of misrepresentation, equivocal representation,
twin cases, and Frege cases.Download pdf | Journal link

Who's afraid of the big, bad wolf? Naturalizing empty concepts(talk format) Externalist theories of representation (including most naturalistic psychosemantic theories) typically require some relation to obtain between a representation and what it represents. As a result, empty concepts cause problems for such theories. I offer a naturalistic and externalist account of empty concepts that shows how they can be shared across individuals. On this account, the brain is a general-purpose model-building machine, where items in the world serve as templates for model construction. Shareable empty concepts arise when there is a common template for different individuals' concepts, but where this template is not what the concept denotes.Download pdf

Too close for comfort? Psychosemantics and the distal(talk format) Naturalistic theories of intentionality typically fail to explain how our mental representations manage to denote distal things rather than mere disjunctions of proximal stimuli. In this paper, I present a neuroscience-based teleosemantic solution to the distality problem. The key observation is that a certain broad type of distal entity - which includes individuals and kinds - is selectionally relevant to the design of the representational network in the cerebral cortex.Download pdf

Concepts

Empiricism regained?(Critical notice of Furnishing the Mind, by Jesse Prinz, MIT Press 2002)Metascience (with reply from Prinz) Prinz presents a theory of concepts (construed as mental particulars) based upon classical imagism - he calls it "proxytype theory". There is much to admire about the book. It is extremely well informed, thoroughly interdisciplinary, and ingenious. However there is a central flaw in Prinz's account of concept individuation that seriously impairs his explanations of categorization and intentional content.Download pdf

Empiricist word learning(With Oleg Favorov; Commentary on Paul Bloom's How Children Learn the Meanings of Words)Behavioral and Brain Sciences 24(6), 2001, p. 1117At first, Bloom's theory appears inimical to empiricism, since he credits very young children with highly sophisticated cognitive resources (e.g. a theory of mind and a belief that real kinds have essences), and he also attacks the empiricist's favoured learning theory, namely associationism. We suggest that, on the contrary, the empiricist can embrace much of what Bloom says.html